A 21st century person’s guide to wordsmithery

How Not To Writte… A Note To Your Flatmate

If you’ve ever lived in a flatshare, student halls or a communal house, then you’ll be VERY familiar with the situation of your food ‘mysteriously’ disappearing in the night (and your flatmate being equally mysteriously covered in crumbs the next morning).

So when someone steals your cheese, or nibbles on your leftover sausage (Ed: easy, tiger!), we all know there’s only one course of action to take – and that’s writing a hugely passive aggressive note to your food-snaffling flatmate on your own choice of brightly coloured Post-it.

Do:

Calmly express that you wish to discuss the current ‘missing food’ situation, without any accusations being thrown about, with a view to reaching a mutually agreeable compromise.

Express in clear terms which item, or items, of food you believe they are ‘misappropriating’, how much said foodstuff cost you and how much you were looking forward to that last slice of leftover frittata.

Offer to buy said items for them in the weekly shop, so you can both enjoy the taste experience without any ill feeling – as long as they come up with some spondoolies to cover the cost of having to re-buy the item.

Suggest a house/flat meeting to discuss division of food stuffs, and suggest perhaps generic foodstuffs that you both/all enjoys are brought out of a household kitty (the financial kind, we don’t condone using the house cat as a rudimentary .

Don’t:

Write ‘You bloody cock womble, you’ve eaten all of my bloody frittata again. Right, that’s it, I’m hiding the loo roll!!!!’ as this will undoubtedly aggravate the situation further (and will also mean you have to carry your loo roll around with you at all times).

Change the house Wi-Fi network name to ‘youfrittatastealinbastard’ in a fit of pique and refuse to let the food kleptomaniac know the password. This may well be a great feat of revenge, but will also royally piss of everyone else in the house.

Write a vengeful status update on Facebook/Twitter/Insta calling your hungry housemate the spawn of Satan as this will almost certainly be read by a mutual acquaintance who will @mention them, landing you in a whole pile of donkey doo.

Forget that food can always be bought again, but that the happy vibe in your house is more difficult to replace…so try to resolve the food situation as peacefully as possible (or wait till there’s something really nice of theirs in the fridge and hide it).